posted 2007/04/11 at 15:03
The CD player in the sweet Aiwa stereo I bought some seven years ago is crapping out on me. Given that the tape decks on the system busted years ago (I still have my old cassette tapes from the 80s/early 90s in storage, plus when I bought my first Japanese textbook it came with cassette tapes of practice stuff), and I've never gotten good radio reception from it, right now the system's basically only good for amplifying incoming audio feeds from my cable feed and my video game systems. It does a good enough job of that -- even without a subwoofer, the system's got all the bass I could ever wish for -- but now when I want to listen to CDs I have to run them through my PS2, and while this doesn't involve much of a signal loss, it is still kind of a pain.
It's going to be a while before I have the money to get a new system here (especially since I don't really need a replacement at this point), but I already know that I'm not going to like that shopping process. A couple of years after I got my system, I bought my father a surround sound system of his own for his birthday, because the rest of the family are much bigger film buffs than I am and they like to watch the movies where surround sound and big bass make a big difference in the experience. In just those short couple of years between buying those two systems, though, the market for those systems had changed dramatically, as now I couldn't find any system with a dedicated CD player at Best Buy, but they all had DVD players. The only other option I had was to buy separate receivers and CD players, and my folks don't like going the component route any more than I do.
On the one hand, I can understand why the market would go to DVD players in these systems just because of how inexpensive the components for DVD players are. Heck, I could drive down to Kroger right now and get a new DVD player for $25 if I needed to. However, when my folks got their new system hooked up, I noticed something that I later noticed with similar systems some of my UT friends had when I visited their apartments: It's nearly impossible to run the DVD player as a CD player without having the television on. For some reason the manufacturers of these systems seem to think it would be better to contain all the controls and track information and such on the television screen instead of on the LCD display of the player. This strikes me as being horribly inefficient, especially given how old CRT TVs are such energy hogs, and how much more distracting having the television screen on is when you really want to focus on the music.
I will grant you that this was a while ago, so maybe the market has changed since then and I can find a suitable system to replace my old Aiwa with when the time comes, but this is one of those cases where I just don't understand why a manufacturer would choose to make a product in this way. Even if the environmentalist in me weren't worried about energy consumption and all of that, I think I'd still be kind of bothered by this.
You're terribly late weighing in on the Don Imus controversy. Do you condone the slander of teenagers on national radio as "nappy headed hos"?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon